A Theology of Birding—Ashlyn McKayla Ohm

by Ashlyn McKayla Ohm

Looking back now, I realize the birds were there long before I noticed them, fluttering about at the edges of my world. A couple of hardworking birdfeeders swung from the moss-furred limbs of the walnut outside our window, and I had casually noticed the birds that came. They were the usual suspects for our Arkansas neighborhood—chickadees and titmice and cardinals, the occasional scarlet splash of a woodpecker—but nothing that could steal my breath in wonder.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic walked across the world, turning off the lights in its wake, and suddenly I was boxed in, trapped in both my house and my head, where anxiety smoked and sparked from the frayed ends of my nerves. My world crushed smaller and smaller around me until I could no longer stand up straight. And that’s when suddenly, the feathered folk around me became my friends.

It happened on a long quarantine stroll at the lake near our house. I was aching for something normal, trying to pretend that the roar of the end of the world wasn’t drumming in my ears. And then I heard a wild, rising trill, a swooping exclamation of the kind of abundant joy the whole heaving world had forgotten. For the first time since the pandemic began, I found myself looking in the only direction that has ever saved anyone—up.

I scanned the treetop, heart stretching toward the beauty of the song, and then the bird itself appeared: a tiny little creature, all twitching tail and whirring wings, shockingly lemon yellow. Astonishment hit like a splash of cold water. I raced after the bird, watching its flight, certain that I was seeing something rare and mysterious and maybe even a little supernatural. After all, such birds weren’t in my area… right?

When I returned home, I pounced on a rarely used field guide, and then I found that my golden bird was a Pine Warbler. Found year-round, the field guide read. Very abundant. Common.

Abundant? Common? Yet I’d lived in this place for two decades and never seen it?

Other birds watched me from the pages of the field guide, others who bore that dismissive adjective—common—yet whose names I’d never heard. Apparently, the trees and fields and grasses I found insultingly mundane had their secrets. In a landscape to which familiarity had blinded me waited a hundred kinds of beauty.

I look back now on that moment as the instant when I was captured by one of my life’s defining passions, birdwatching (or “birding,” as it’s more popularly known). In the years since then, I’ve spent hours looking for, talking about, and generally being completely preoccupied by birds. I’ve pursued this blissful obsession in all directions: birding in different locations across the United States, purchasing every variety of feeder known to mankind, and contributing data from my sightings to eBird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s platform for citizen science observations. I once spent a freezing, windy September night with a research group deep in the heart of Rocky Mountain National Park, scrambling over steep, dark hillsides in search of Saw-whet Owls; that’s a sure sign that the line from fun to fanaticism has been crossed.

Yet birding has been far more for me than just a diverting hobby or an enjoyable pastime or even a therapeutic way to relax. It is instead a means of grace by which I am constantly formed and re-formed, a heart-shaping activity that increases my awareness of and communion with God through slow development of several spiritual habits.

The first and most obvious of these habits is the art of attentiveness. As I learned in my early encounter with that Pine Warbler, the presence of birds is far more constant than our awareness of them. If we are distracted, our attention fragmented by our own concerns and ricocheting off the walls of our narrow self-absorption, then we will never even notice them in our fast-blurring lives.

And we certainly won’t be able to identify them; birds don’t tell their names willingly. A faint eyebrow line here, a dab of yellow on the wing there, a particular curve and set of the beak—differentiating among field marks like these is nearly impossible while the bird is in constant motion in a treetop canopy thirty or forty feet in the air. Try discerning between an Alder Flycatcher and a Willow Flycatcher, or warblers in their drab fall plumage, or birding’s famous lookalike duo: Cooper’s Hawk and Sharp-shinned Hawk. (And don’t get me started on shorebirds. I’m convinced only God Himself can identify shorebirds.) Each case requires not the hasty snap judgments so common in our culture, but a more penetrating way to observe, question, and behold.

Thus, to notice birds at all, and to truly see them after that, we must be willing to embrace the virtue of slow, focused attention, a practice many of us find difficult at first. Visually probing a tree or bush for the faint flicker of a leaf that would indicate a hidden warbler is not for the impatient. Sitting beside a lake with binoculars trying to see the particular shade of red on a merganser’s head will not give you a productivity-triggered dopamine jolt. Our culture has exalted a fractalized focus as a virtue, but birding—and discipleship—require us to stretch our attention, and by extension our souls as well. I’m reminded of Simone Weil’s assertion that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” The attentiveness we practice while birding is a form of worship that transfers to our relational lives, making us better able to notice the people and situations around us with curiosity, empathy, and compassion.

And that attentiveness leads to greater rootedness. When we begin to notice the world, we can’t help but become more a part of it—especially the humble wonder of our particular home patch. Birding expands our perception of and interaction with the world; pulling on the thread of birding makes us witness to the woven beauty of the entire ecosystem around us. My passion for birds has brought in its wake an ancillary knowledge of my home’s ecology. My family and I have learned the names of native plants and grown them to provide food and habitat for the birds that depend on them. I’ve become more attuned to seasonal cycles as the great sweeping drama of migration swings the pendulum of the year back and forth. I have a keener eye for weather patterns, moon phases, population trends for other local wildlife, and even the fluctuating length of day and night. All of these affect birds, but they affect me as well.

A modern malady is that many of us feel disconnected from the world, sucked into screens and living a half-life in a virtual vortex. But birding connects me once again to the tangible goodness of reality; in short, it helps me belong in my own life. I’m reminded of the Benedictine spiritual value of “stability,” one manifestation of which is stability of place. In her book The Artist’s Rule, artist and Benedictine oblate Christine Valters Paintner explains stability of place as “kinship with the landscape,” and her suggestions for cultivating this virtue echo the blessings of my birding experience: honoring associated cultures and rituals, familiarizing ourselves with historical traditions, and learning about native flora and fauna. She declares that “this is at the heart of finding the sacred everyday—discovering that the place where we are is enough, that God dwells right here.” Our home place, wherever that may be, invites us to fully inhabit it. And birds can help open the door.

When we practice attentiveness and rootedness, we receive their rightful reward: delight. I’ll be honest: birding isn’t always fun, by common definition. (That windy mountain night of falling over every rock and root in the dark, without a Saw-whet Owl in sight, comes to mind.) Yet birding continues to train me in delight: not because everything goes perfectly, but because it doesn’t. Although often misunderstood as an involuntary emotion, delight at its core is far more than a passive emotional response to whatever happiness comes our way, or doesn’t. Instead, it’s the discipline of actively training ourselves to take joy in the story we’re living, to seek out and celebrate transcendental moments, to allow ourselves to be continually surprised by the extravagant goodness and beauty of the world.

I was reminded afresh of the power of delight a few weeks ago, when I was among a birding group with a man who’d only begun the hobby a year before. “I’ve never seen a Red-winged Blackbird,” he said breathlessly, eyes aglow as he stared in awe at a bird I’ve seen thousands of times. “Every bird I see today is new for me.” There’s a real temptation in birding to begin to overlook common birds. Oh, just another American Robin. No one is frantically fumbling for binoculars to admire pigeons in parking lots. But delight takes a radical counter-view. Delight insists on the careful cultivation of that newness of spirit, the grateful realization that this bird, this day, this moment—no matter how “ordinary”—is a gift, the generosity of which ought to always surprise us.

And the generous gifts of birding itself, as we’ve seen, are many. Attentiveness, rootedness, and delight are only a few of the virtues that birding helps me develop. But as wonderful as these gifts are, the most powerful blessing of birding in my life is also the simplest: birds give me a reason to look up.

You see, birds are ridiculously resilient and forgiving. They return to ravaged ecosystems, adapt to our urban sprawl, sing sweetly outside our windows when we’re too preoccupied to notice them, and continue to grace our forests even when we’ve forgotten the name of every tree. They keep nesting, keep singing, keep making their impossible migrations, and keep showing us just how much beauty exists, impossibly fragile yet irresistibly strong. In other words, Emily Dickinson was right: hope really is a “thing with feathers.”

And birds share this hope unwaveringly with us. I’m not naturally a person of hope; doubt, anxiety, and despair are much more instinctual responses for me. But birds simply won’t allow me to stop believing, to lose my vision, to drown in the murk of my own waterlogged fears. Instead, their brilliant flashes of beauty in the corners of my life remind me of how real and present grace truly is. Like the birds, it hovers around the edges of our world—sometimes in plain sight for those who can see, but more often only found after the patient pursuit of love. We are not left to suffocate in a closed system, breathing the stale air of our own recycled fears. We are being invaded by a relentless Love that rushes to this waiting earth and never stops making Himself known—including, maybe especially, through birds.

There have been many times when I was unable to talk to God, but I could talk about birds. There have been whole seasons when prayer seemed impossible, but birding was as easy as a walk out the door. There have been stages of my life when I could not see the hand of God anywhere, yet I could always see the cardinals fluttering around my feeders, or feel the shadow of a soaring hawk swoop over me, or hear the mockingbird that sings tenaciously each summer, all the way through moonless nights.

Thus, birds for me are icons, capturing in miniature the vast and grand qualities of God. When I’m birding, I’m not just enjoying an outdoor activity or looking for a rare species (though let’s be honest, that desire is never far from my mind). Instead, in a small way, I’m practicing spiritual skills. The attentiveness, rootedness, and delight I’ve developed haven’t just made me a better birder; they’ve made me a better daughter, a better friend, a better writer, and most important, a better disciple.

When I think back to that moment with the Pine Warbler, I think of how many times I’d visited that same spot. When you don’t see, you don’t know, and I had walked with my head down right underneath all the wings. I had been so unwilling to push myself into that blurry fringe where my awareness stops and reality begins. I’m grateful that the birds and their Maker made themselves known to me anyway. Now I’m the eccentric girl who wanders the fields with binoculars slung around my shoulders and a head permanently tilted skyward. My neighbors smile indulgently, but I hope they listen when I tell them. Look up. Pay attention. Don’t miss the grace whose wings throb like heartbeats, so much closer than you know.

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A worshiper of the Creator and a wanderer of creation, Ashlyn McKayla Ohm is a content producer at The Rabbit Room and is the author of several books, including the poetry collection High Country Hymnal. Her work has been featured by Anselm Society, Truly Co., Calla Press, Vessels of Light, Heart of Flesh, and more. If she’s not daydreaming about her next writing project, you’ll find her hiking, birdwatching, or otherwise getting lost in the woods. She is the creator of the birding resource Branching into Birding and shares her writing at wildgoosewords.substack.com.